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February 07, 2018

Transfiguration as a revelation of the defeat of death - Kenneth Tanner

The transfiguration is a revelation of the defeat of death. Elementary observations of that moment that make this plain are often overlooked or unspoken. Here are Moses and Elijah very much alive and embodied. Second, they are speaking with Jesus. Human speech requires tongues and tongues require bodies.

The disciples are witnessing not cleverly devised mythology but resurrection. This reality of resurrection is just outside our kin, just beyond our ability to perceive it, and yet it is nevertheless everywhere, and near us, and greater than death. Resurrection is the end of all things, not death.

On the holy mountain the law and the prophets are in a conversation with their embodied human perfection and their talk is about sacred sacrificial love, about what Jesus would “accomplish” at Jerusalem, about the cross.

For a fleeting moment, the disciples witness the “eternal now,” the glory of what Eastern Christians call the “uncreated light” that is waiting to be unveiled everywhere and in every ordinary thing in creation, the light of resurrection.

This unique illumination, unavailable part from self-sacrificial love, is made possible by the humility of God incarnate. The suffering of God in the human flesh of Jesus is what fills the universe with a light more radiant than all stars.

This uncreated light reveals not the color and shape and size and texture of a thing or a person as natural light does but the goodness, beauty, and verity instilled in the thing or her by God.

The universe is called out of nothing and upheld and sustained in movement and life by the God who gives all of himself for this expanding cosmos they as One make and this selflessness is what truly and in the end illuminates everything that exists.

When by grace we participate in this selflessness by the Spirit we inherit the permanence that God is by nature; we become one with the Father who said “Let light shine out of the darkness,” which light shines from the face of Moses, which light is like the chariots of fire that carry Elijah beyond the sight of Elisha; the Father who has “made this light shine in our hearts so that we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ” his Son.